TNF-alpha inhibitors represent one of the most important areas of biopharmaceuticals by sales, with three blockbusters accounting for 8 % of total pharmaceutical sale in Norway. With use of a unique natural policy experiment in Norway, this paper examines to what extent the identity of the...

TNF-alpha inhibitors represent one of the most important areas of biopharmaceuticals by sales, with three blockbusters accounting for 8 per cent of total pharmaceutical sale in Norway. Novelty of the paper is to examine, with the use of a unique natural policy experiment in Norway, to what...

In the European Union, medicines are regulated products subject to both single market (e.g., regional exhaustion of property rights) and country specific health care regulations (e.g., medicines pricing and distribution regulation). This gives rise to parallel trade (PT), a phenomenon that takes...

We study the impact of product margins on pharmacies’ incentive to promote generics instead of brand-names. First, we construct a theoretical model where pharmacies can persuade patients with a brand-name prescription to purchase a generic version instead. We show that pharmacies’...

We study the impact of regulation on competition between brand-names and generics and pharmaceutical expenditures using a unique policy experiment in Norway, where reference pricing (RP) replaced price cap regulation in 2003 for a sub-sample of off-patent products. First, we construct a vertical...

Several studies suggest that, on the basis of life expectancy (LE) regressions, new pharmaceutical drugs are responsible for some of the marked gains in LE observed over the last 50 years. We critically appraise these studies. We point out several modeling issues, including disentangling the...

This paper examines the impact of coinsurance exemption for prescription medicines applied to elderly individuals in Spain after retirement. To evaluate this coinsurance change we use a rich administrative dataset that links pharmaceutical consumption and hospital discharge records for the full...